My Collection: Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

I’m an accidental video game collector. I never set out to collect video games, but I’ve been a gamer pretty much my entire life and I didn’t really get rid of anything as time passed. Each new system meant new games.

I was born to two parents whose first and last gaming experience was Pong on Atari (but, still, how cool is it that my decidedly not-geeky parents gamed a bit?). I think that the fun they had playing is why they were so supportive of me getting an NES when it came out.

When you’re a kid gamer, you can’t really do anything without parental patronage (financial and otherwise). So it was with my parents’ support, or at least not their disapproval, that I started on my gamer journey.

A few years later, my family moved to Japan. My love of gaming grew, being at the source of the golden age of video games and in a society where gaming culture was huge for people of all ages. My brother and I played together. We subscribed to Nintendo Power. My collection grew.

When I left for college, most of my games stayed home with my younger brother. I packed up the PlayStation 1 (I’ve always been a PS girl) and all my favorite games (FF8, Point Blank, Monster Rancher, Resident Evil) and said good-bye to everything else. Funds were limited in my college years. My collection grew slowly.

Then I married another gamer. My husband was also a life-long gamer and had amassed a pretty intense collection of games. He had games I’d never heard of, and suddenly we had two copies of all the best games (like Earthbound) and multiples of every gaming console system (we have 4 SNES consoles in our basement). My collection more than doubled.

Now, I’m here in my mid-30s with a basement full of video games.

Right now, they are currently spread across multiple shelving units, tucked in drawers, and otherwise haphazardly arranged.

My goal for the next year is to play some games I haven’t played or haven’t beat (NES review coming soon) and to get organized. I want a really cute display for all of our games. I bought my husband a professional, organized display for his comic book collection, and I want to do the same for our games.

So, to kick off the series, here’s my NES collection and my favorites. The games I beat and the games I loved.

I’d write more but my toddler slammed her fist into my keyboard today, and cause a hard shutdown, and now it’s not working correctly. Cross your fingers for me that a restart will fix the issue. In the meantime, I’m going to check out Observation (PS4).